Script to get counts of missing values and generate graphs for figure 1 from The potential of acoustic monitoring of aquatic insects for freshwater assessment

Aquatic insects are a major indicator used to assess ecological condition in freshwater environments. Yet current methods to collect and identify aquatic insects require advanced taxonomic expertise and rely on invasive techniques that lack spatio-temporal replication. Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is emerging as a non-invasive complementary sampling method allowing broad spatio-temporal and taxonomic coverage. The application of PAM in freshwater ecosystems has already proven useful, revealing unexpected acoustic diversity produced by fish, amphibians, submerged aquatic plants, and aquatic insects. However, the identity of species producing sounds remains largely unknown. Among them, aquatic insects appear to be the major contributor to freshwater soundscapes. Here, we estimate the potential number of soniferous aquatic insects worldwide using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. We found that four aquatic insect orders produce sounds totalling over 7000 species. This number is likely underestimated due to poor knowledge of aquatic insects bioacoustics. We then assess the value of sound producing aquatic insects to evaluate ecological condition and find that they might be useful despite having similar responses in pristine and degraded environments in some cases. Both expert and automated identifications will be necessary to build international reference libraries and to conduct acoustic bioassessment in freshwaters.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards a global toolkit for insect biodiversity monitoring’.